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Director of the Adam Smith Institute Dr Eamonn Butler participated in BBC Radio 4′s Moral Maze programme: Is it a Moral Duty to Vote? Dr Butler argued that the irrational nature of voting and the abysmal state of UK democracy illustrate why people have no moral duty to engage in the voting process.

The Financial Times gave a glowing review of Dr Madsen Pirie’s upcoming book “How To Win Every Argument: The Use And Abuse of Logic“, soon to be released.

All this is not only entertaining: it is genuinely useful when it comes to thinking about how arguments work. Mr Pirie’s contention is that, if you master the fallacies, you are not only better equipped to expose them in your opponents’ arguments, but will be able yourself “to perpetrate fallacies with mischief at heart and malice aforethought”. This is a low and sneaky tactic but an undoubtedly effective one.

Mr Pirie adds: “It is well worth the reader’s trouble to learn the Latin tags wherever possible. When an opponent is accused of perpetrating something with a Latin name it sounds as if he is suffering from a rare tropical disease. It has the added effect of making the accuser seem both erudite and authoritative.”

Tom Papworth – Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute and author of ASI paper “The Green Noose: An analysis of Green Belts and proposals for reform” – wrote a comment piece for Public Sector Executive calling for radical overhaul of the UK’s planning structure:

Voltaire once quipped that the Holy Roman Empire was not holy, was not Roman and was not an empire. In light of the fact that they are neither particularly green, nor are they exactly belts, one might say something similar about England’s green belts.

Originally conceived to prevent urban sprawl, preserve a rural/urban distinction, stop the agglomeration of towns and encourage city-centre renewal, the green belt designation has come to encompass far more land than we have actually developed.

Green belts are twice as big as the cities they aim to contain and 50% bigger than the total amount of developed land in England.

Yet, as I discuss in ‘The Green Noose’, my recent report for the Adam Smith Institute, the fundamental premises of green belt policy are confused, ambiguous and flawed.

The ASI’s paper “The Real Problem was Nominal” was quoted in The Daily Telegraph.

Some experts have already warned that the ECB is not doing enough. Scott Sumner, a leading monetary economist, said that “European officials have not learned any of the lessons offered by the Japanese experience” of prolonged economic stagnation.

“The [QE] policy would have been far more effective if done a year or two ago,” he wrote in a paper published by the Adam Smith Institute.

“The Real Problem was Nominal” - written by Prof Scott Sumner, a leading economist who was a key inspiration for the Federal Reserve’s QE3 programme - explains how the European Central Bank is repeating the mistakes that the Fed and Bank of England made in the 2008 crisis—trying to plan credit and micromanage the financial sector, when the real issue is excessively tight monetary policy.

The paper argues that Eurozone quantitative easing will not reverse the Eurozone’s decline unless it is open-ended and tied more explicitly to the ECB’s inflation target. Targeting nominal GDP—the total amount of spending in the economy, also known as aggregate demand—would be even better, the paper argues, guaranteeing more stability when unexpected supply-side shocks like oil price movements make inflation targeting trickier.

Head of Research at the Adam Smith Institute, Ben Southwood, spoke to BBC World News about Mexico City’s new scheme to incentivise people to exercise by subsidising their travel service; he also argued that the proposals in the UK to curb obesity are too intrusive into individual’s lives.